Today is going to be a fun day. The weather will be warm(ish), and the garden bed will get tilled. Time to plant some onions and potatoes! Time to plant beets!
Also time to move the chickens into a different domicile. They aren’t ready to move to their coop, but the box seems cramped and unfriendly. Steve says he has some chicken cages, that will let them look around and maybe not feel quite so trapped.
Or, you know, from a chicken windowless interrogation room to a chicken jail.
I didn’t expect to feel like such a jailer in this human/chicken relationship. I thought it would be so mutually beneficial. They give me eggs and I give them a lovely place to live, food and water. They’d be independent and entertaining. You know, like cats!
This morning on the Knopf Doubleday “poem of the day” post which I get every National Poetry Month, was a poem by the Chinese Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu that captures this relationship– more closely tied to the food chain than the peaceable kingdom!
I’ve been working on my own little chicken poem. I figure I’ll add stanzas as the “relationship” develops. I hope it has a happy ending!
The baby chicks
cheep cheep cheep
and huddle beneath
their new mother lamp.
They shudder in my hand
as I stroke their downy backs.
I coo and try to soothe.
In response, they poop.
The adolescent chicks
jump and thump the lid
of the box, protest captivity
but don’t want to be picked up.
Always they protest me,
the hand that feeds them,
that moves them to clean the box,
with evil eye and defiant beak.
To get a poem-a-day delivered to your e-mail inbox during April, visit this site at Knopf. Here is the link to the Du Fu broadside.
You make me smile:)